


Over the Edge

by orangesandlemons



Category: The Good Wife (TV)
Genre: Because I hate that fucker, But what are you going to do, F/F, F/M, Non-Graphic Rape/Non-Con, Non-Graphic Violence, Please do not think the Nick/Kalinda tag makes this a pro-Nick/Kalinda fic
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-08-16
Updated: 2014-08-16
Packaged: 2018-02-13 08:32:04
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply, Rape/Non-Con
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,675
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2144022
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orangesandlemons/pseuds/orangesandlemons
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Alicia asks Kalinda what really happened the night Nick disappeared.  Set in the hotel room scene in Boom De Yah Da.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Over the Edge

“I miss this.” 

"Yeah."

"I'm sorry."

“I know.” 

Kalinda lets the words hang in the stuffy air of the cabin for a long moment, hoping for something more – anything. An aeon goes by; Alicia doesn't speak. Forcing back a wave of sorrow, Kalinda has just opened her mouth to say something job-related, something inconsequential, when –

“Did you kill him?”

Kalinda starts. “Who?” she asks, stupidly. 

“Nick. Did you kill him?”

The silence spins out between them. Kalinda feels like she's standing on a cliff face, wind whistling through her hair, trying to decide whether to jump. 

“Kalinda --”

“No,” Kalinda says. “I didn't.”

Another moment of silence goes by. It's making Kalinda want to crash through the window, go tearing through the night. 

“I don't believe you,” Alicia tells her. 

“Why is that?” Kalinda asks, voice perfectly even. She hopes Alicia can't hear what that evenness is costing her. 

“Because it doesn't make sense. You say you're sure, absolutely sure, he's not coming back. How can you be sure? He seems... unpredictable. How can you know?” 

Kalinda swallows. “I... put a scare into him before he left.” 

“What? What does that mean?”

“You really want to know?” 

“Yes,” Alicia says, voice suddenly heated, and Kalinda blinks, caught off-guard. “I do want to know. You said you were going to be open with me, Kalinda. I haven't seen much of it yet. Give it a try.”

“All right,” Kalinda says, but for the first time her voice is unsteady. When she'd promised to be open, this wasn't what she'd pictured. She closes her eyes, trying to pull together what it will take to get through this. She tries to put herself back in that moment –- the darkened office, fighting back the panic tearing at her, trying to sound calm and collected, trying to sound a lot stronger than she thinks she is. The bulletproof vest is heavy against her chest, constricting. Nick's circling her, blue eyes alight and sparking –- the kind of light that could turn into insanity in a few short seconds. When she speaks her voice is dreamy, as though the scene in her mind has hypnotized her. 

“I met up with Nick the night you and I had drinks together,” Kalinda says. “I got him to come to Lockhart-Gardner --”

“Lockhart- _Gardner?_ ”

“Let me get through this, Alicia, please.” Kalinda's eyes remain closed. 

“I'm sorry. Go on.” 

“I met him at Lockhart/Gardner. It seemed like a... controlled place to be. I met him and I told him that I had called the cops about his drug running, that it was over. I told him where he could cross the border and I told him where I'd left $10,000 for him. And I told him to go.” 

“And?”

“He didn't believe me.” 

“So...”

“So I pulled my gun on him,” Kalinda says, still in her trance, talking past Alicia. “He pulled one too, of course, but not fast enough. I disarmed him and made him walk to my car. I made him drive me to a dump yard a ways out of the city. I made him lie down face-first on a tarp on the ground. And I pointed the gun at his head.”

“ _Kalinda_ \--”

“I fired into the ground beside his head. Three times.”

Alicia lets out a rush of breath. 

“It was a mess. A piece of rock cut his head and he was bleeding a lot. I think it took him a while to realize he wasn't dead.”

“And then what?” Alicia says after a very long silence, when it becomes clear to her that Kalinda isn't going to speak unless she's prompted. 

Kalinda starts a bit, as if waking from her dream. “And I told him to think of how easy all of this had been. How easily I could have killed him. How powerless he was to stop it. I told him to think about whether he's really a match for me, these days. I'm not Leela anymore. I think he's finally figured that out. Either way, though, he isn't coming back.” 

“You're sure.”

“I'm positive. I know him much better than he knows me. He's a coward, really. And –” Kalinda's voice drops, slow and low now. “If he comes back, I will kill him. And he knows it.” 

Alicia winces away from the ice in Kalinda's tone. “You'd do that?”

“To protect...” Kalinda hesitates. “To protect people I care about? Yeah.” 

“So you're saying...” Alicia's voice trails off. Kalinda's back on the cliff face, toes hanging over thin air. 

“So you're safe, then,” Alicia says finally, and Kalinda lets her head fall back against the pillow, suddenly exhausted. 

“Yeah. I told you. I'm safe. So are you.” 

“I... thank you.” 

“Sure.”

“It seems funny,” Alicia says, with a half-smile. “To thank you for doing that. Threatening him like that. Getting rid of him that way.”

“You wish I hadn't?”

“No, of course not,” Alicia says, startled. “I'm sorry. I know the whole thing is... complicated.”

“Yeah,” Kalinda says. “You could say that.” 

“I know it wasn't easy.” 

“No.” 

And abruptly Kalinda is in the moment again – Nick lying prone before her, her gun trained on his head. As she'd forced him to drive to the dump, as she'd forced him to lie down, even as she'd pointed the gun at him, she hadn't been sure what she was going to do. She let her hand drift a few inches. And she began to think. 

She thought of the last few weeks with Nick, the way he'd overturned her life, started to make her into somebody she didn't want to be. She thought about the work she'd missed and the shoddy work she'd done, when work was all that had mattered to her for years – thought of blowing off work while he shoved his hand in her cunt in the middle of an ice cream shop. She thought about bruises on her wrists, a pulled muscle in her neck. She thought of him on top of her, thought of both the revulsion and the sick pleasure it aroused in her, thought of how much it made her hate both him and herself. And she fired the gun into the ground once. 

She thought back to Leela, too, the person he'd made her in the years they'd been together, the person he'd been trying to turn her back into. She thought of herself cringing in corners, hoping not to get hurt. She thought of him fucking her when she didn't want it. She thought of blood in the toilet bowl. She thought of running credit card fraud when he'd run out of money and was too stupid to do it himself, thought of nursing the endless bruises and cuts he picked up in bar brawls, thought of making him his fucking eggs. And she fired the gun into the ground a second time. 

Then she thought of Alicia – of Nick threatening Alicia. She thought of Alicia, who had done nothing to earn any of this. She thought of danger glinting in Nick's eyes, danger hanging over Alicia's head. She thought of the fear she'd lived with every day as Nick's Leela, thought of how easily it had come back as soon as he set foot back in her life. She thought of that fear taking lodging in Alicia, thought of her trying to live with that every day, every moment. She thought of what Nick might do if Alicia didn't toe the line. And she moved the gun six inches and shot Nick in the back of the head. 

Alicia will never know this. She'll never know what the back of a human head looks like once a Glock has gone to work on it, never know how hard it is to drag the body of a dead man twice your size into the trunk of a car. She'll never know the particular spreading wave that occurs when a body is slipped into water, how it rocks a stolen rowboat, throwing the world askew; she'll never know how that wave is disrupted by the splash of an anchoring cinder block, roped to the body to make sure it never comes back up. She'll never know what it is to know a little piece of your own soul has just sunk to the bottom of Lake Michigan. 

As much as she needed to protect Alicia from Nick, Kalinda thinks, she needs to protect Alicia from this knowledge. But then again, maybe her motives are more selfish than that. Maybe she can't tell Alicia that she killed Nick because she's pretty sure Alicia would hate her if she did. 

Across the room, Alicia says quietly, “You did it for me, didn't you? Not for yourself. For me.” 

Kalinda starts, tries to pull herself out of her reverie, tries to find a good answer to what seems like an impossibly freighted question. _Yes,_ her brain tells her. _Just say yes. Stop lying to her. Yes._

“I did it for us,” she says finally.

“For us.”

“For you. For me. That's us.” 

“Is it?”

Kalinda turns a bit to face Alicia, startled and confused. At least, she tells herself she's confused, because she doesn't want to bother building up a hope that she's sure will be shot down in moments. 

But -– 

“I miss us,” Alicia says, almost in a whisper. And she holds out a hand to Kalinda. 

Inching closer to the cliff edge, feeling her center of gravity begin to shift, Kalinda reaches out, gives Alicia's hand a squeeze. Alicia squeezes back. 

Kalinda decides to jump. 

Holding her breath, she gets up slowly, squeezes Alicia's hand once more, releases it. She crosses the small space between them, climbs carefully into bed next to Alicia, leaving a few inches separating them. She can feel the wind rushing past her, the drop in her stomach, the terror of free-fall. 

Alicia inclines her head toward Kalinda, resting her forehead against Kalinda's temple. 

And Kalinda realizes that somewhere along the way, she has learned how to fly.


End file.
